Roy Nachum’s works are visual allegories based upon a self-invented mythology that lay bare his own internalized struggles. By manifesting the world of his unconscious onto a single canvas he manages to extract deep and moving pieces of his own Psyche and transport them to the viewer.

Roy Nachum paintings are extraordinary and provocative. They define life on all levels; waking, dreaming, repressed and retrospective. The life-scaled oil paintings are surrealistic portraying a fantasy realm, where viewers witness psychological turning points of the subjects’ lives.

Expressed through classic beauty mixed with raw avant-garde maturity Nachum’s characters are often caught between worlds: submergence/emergence, naiveté/maturity, wilderness/civilization. This duality is overlaid with a texture of raised “pixels” created from paint that belie the photo-realistic quality of his paintings. This playful mimicking of the digital printer’s thumbprint forces the viewer to “zoom in” leading to the realization that each of these near-perfect paint daubs have been individually created by the artist’s skillful hands.

While the lighting and deep umber backgrounds reference his cinematic sense of framing, it is the raw emotion, captivating movements and uncanny ability to capture the essence of humanism which reveal his talent for storytelling. He works in oil paint on canvas to create works which, while being visually stunning, are also created with the intentional notion to summon the viewer to “dig deeper” and investigate beyond the mere apparent representation. This is why his work intrigues us to look into our selves to understand what we are seeing better.

As far as the aesthetics of his work, Nachum creates his images by utilizing the idea of pixels, small paint-pixels which, together grow to finally unify the entire. Each ‘pixel’ is painted one-by-one. The end result is a rich and complete work of art, but the method to reach this point is quite unique and exclusive to the artist himself.

Each individual pixel contains it’s own milieu and serves a purpose in relating this contribution into the painting. While from afar the painting appears to be only one entity, when examined further, these pixels prove to have life of their own, equally contributing to the whole. Nachum describes this as creating micro worlds, individual pieces of a complex puzzle, that come together to reveal an unexpected reality.

Our visual sense is far more complex than we realize and each object we see is made up of millions of colors textures and patterns. Nachum’s artistic genius sees beyond the whole picture deep into the these intricate components. This enables him to replicate the visions of his reality, imagination and dreams so vibrantly.

Roy Nachum has exhibited frequently in Israel, Paris. Berlin, New York and Los Angeles. He transports on canvases a mix of his imaginary world and his real life. The works are a representative collaboration, part of his memories, part from his dreams as well as binary readings of real and unreal elements. An adult psychological fairy tale, if you will, somewhere between our dreams and reality, deep within our unconscious minds, where we encounter the archetypes of our psyche, familiarities close to us and the figments of our imagination.

Nachum implores his viewers to give in to their desires of the senses and to feel and touch every pixel, experience the virtual and physical melding in one pristine moment. Influenced by everything that surrounds us.